Latest / Get Savvy...Demystifying Healthcare / Episode 147: Breast Implants: What I Wish I’d Known Before Surgery with Dr. Kayte

Transcript

Episode 147: Breast Implants: What I Wish I’d Known Before Surgery with Dr. Kayte · Get Savvy...Demystifying Healthcare

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: But what I figured out, which was unique to me and potentially a factor in other women who got sick and a differentiating factor in why someone some women don't get sick, is that our bodies respond to a foreign implant by creating a scar tissue capsule around it.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: And that scar tissue capsule has been the study of a lot of research because in the aesthetics world, if it gets too hard or if it contracts, it can look very bad.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: So it's considered a bad aesthetic outcome.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_04: But what we found in the implant illness community is that people who get sick usually don't make very good scar tissue.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: If healthcare has ever left you feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, or stuck, this show is for you.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to GetStabby, the Mystify Healthcare weekly podcast, where we take complicated healthcare topics and make them simple.
• 0:54
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• 1:03
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• 1:06
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• 1:16
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• 1:19
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• 1:47
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• 2:00
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• 2:36
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• 2:55
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• 3:10
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• 3:47
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• 3:54
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• 4:05
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• 4:07
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• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: And now on with the show.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the show from Chronic Illness to Healing, Dr.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: Kate Seuss's story.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: What if the safety information you were given before surgery wasn't the whole story, or years after surgery, you're faced with a chronic illness that impacts your life.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: You're frustrated and wondering, how could this have happened?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: To help us get more into this topic and then some today, Dr.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: Kate Seuss is joining us.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: Dr.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: Kate is a chiropractor, educator, entrepreneur, and the author of Beyond Beauty, a deeply personal memoir about survival, healing, and transformation.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: Blending memoir with science, Dr.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: Kate shares what she learned through years of exploring trauma, chronic illness, toxic exposures, regenerative medicine, and personal growth.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: At the heart of the book is one central message.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: The identities that help us survive are not always the identities that help us heal.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the show, Dr.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: Kate.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: Hi, thank you so much for having me, Sandy.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um I love the topic of your show, and I think it's so important to have resources to demystify healthcare.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so grateful.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for saying that.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's been a labor of love for sure, but I do think uh healthcare literacy is pretty high.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it it is my goal to bring on amazing people like yourself to cover different topics and help us.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: So with that, why don't you start by telling us your story and how it has led you on the journey you were on today?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a really dense long story.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_04: When I originally was offered the opportunity to do a book, the publisher was very interested in the topic of breast implant injury.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_04: And they published a book in the 90s by an actress who had breast implant injury, and they got into a very big lawsuit with the pharmaceutical manufacturer.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_04: And my publisher, Wiley, is a is a big publisher.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: They've been around for 200 years.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: They do a lot of educational books, textbooks, and they won that lawsuit, but it was a big legal battle.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of people don't know about what happened in the 90s with breast implants, and then it went very quiet for decades.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: And then when breast implants came back on the market, no one was really talking about the illness concerns until accounts started to come out.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_04: And then we reopened the legal side and there were changes with the FDA.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_04: So I was very much in the dark for a long time as I was pre that movement and then part of that movement.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_04: But when the publisher wanted to do a book about breast implants, by that point in my career, I had already been a voice in the breast implant space and I had already started moving into a new space that was more about understanding body modification, um, identity and what meeting women where they are.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_04: Going on platforms or writing a book saying breast implants are terrible and no one should have them.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to approach it really differently and talk about like a woman's journey throughout her whole life and what other things might set her up for failure when she has a big toxic exposure, which breast implants can be for some people.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_04: So that's my origin story for the book.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_04: When I when I was in undergrad, I studied fine art and public relations and I had the intention to work in fashion, which I ended up doing.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_04: I moved to Los Angeles.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_04: I had a very busy life in fashion and nightlife and uh really experiencing like freedom for the first time in my life because I had a very like oppressive, difficult childhood and a lot of like growing up early having to survive.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_04: And so when I got to college and I had resources through financial aid and scholarships, and then when I graduated and got out into the world, it felt like just the world was for the first time like an amazing place that accepted me.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_04: But what I didn't realize was that I was operating a lot of different identities that were not really my true self because I didn't really have a true self.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_04: I had to manufacture different versions to survive and exist.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_04: So that became complicated.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: But I was still young enough and healthy enough where the consequences has not had not caught up in the health side and my cell tissue in my body.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I see this a lot when people experience a tipping point event, is typically they think if I hadn't done that one thing, I would not have ever become sick.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_04: But usually there's a lot below the surface and you have an event that kind of tips you.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_04: And that's when you see a lot of people moving into chronic illness who are having debilitating melt shutdowns that feel like they happened overnight, where they go from feeling normal to feeling non-functional.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, there's a lot of nervous system overlap we could get into with that around trauma.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_04: But in my case, I got breast implants.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_04: I was 28 years old.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_04: I had been a high school and college all-American athlete.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_04: I was a wrestler.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_04: I had a really intense athletic background and I understood training limits.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_04: And after I got breast implants, I couldn't handle basic gym training and I was having a ton of systemic pain.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_04: And when I went to the doctor, they couldn't tell me why.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_04: They said I was overtraining.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't think I was overtraining because again, I had been to like national wrestling training camps where we really overtrained.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_04: I knew what that felt like.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_04: It was I really wasn't overtraining.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_04: But I stopped training, the pain was still there, and then I started to develop a cascade of other symptoms swelling, really severe brain fog, confusion, alcohol intolerance, intolerance to my entire lifestyle, and couldn't stay up late anymore.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_04: I required a lot more rest.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_04: I couldn't find answers from holistic doctors.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, holistic doctors had theories.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_04: We tested medical doctors, none of it answered.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_04: And my labs were pretty normal.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_04: So I started thinking, what do I do?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_04: Like, where do I go from here?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_04: The lifestyle I had, the work I was doing, none of it was sustainable relatively quickly.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, within maybe a nine-month period, and I had some savings, but um I decided to start pursuing medical paths and I looked into a lot of medical programs.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I thought, well, I'm primarily having muscle and joint pain.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_04: So chiropractic was an interesting program.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_04: I wanted to go to regular medical school, but because I had a bachelor's in art, it would have taken a lot longer to get into regular medical school with, you know, the testing and the doing the science prerequisites I didn't have.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_04: So I ended up going to chiropractic school.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_04: And once I got into that program, none of those interventions helped me at all.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_04: I was still in pain.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_04: I saw other people getting adjustments and acupuncture and muscle work and rebalancing.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: And I needed all of that, but it didn't touch the pain.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_04: And so I didn't know why.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_04: It was confusing because I saw other people getting out of pain.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_04: And then I found out there was this group doing what they called functional medicine.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_04: And this was over a decade ago now.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_04: And they said, you know, there's metabolic causes of pain.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you can learn about those reasons if you come to our trainings.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_04: So I started doing functional medicine training in parallel to my chiropractic school training.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_04: So by the time I graduated, I had already done over 10,000 hours in basically what is internal medicine.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_04: And then when I graduated, um, I realized that that's very complicated to practice as a chiropractor.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_04: So my path got routed into media, television hosting, medical education.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: I work now in biotech doing basically clinical education.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: But along that period of time, I learned I figured out that breast implants were extremely toxic and I started to open up a whole cascade of different peeling back the onion.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then there's was some very interesting regulatory things I learned that I talked about in the book around some of the early players in the breast implant movement and and how that related personally to my journey, but I didn't know because they had been silenced by the FDA or by some organizations in the 90s.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_03: What an interesting path you've taken, and and I appreciate that immensely.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_03: So, what did you discover?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: You're feeling these pains, you're feeling tired, your life is really not the same.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: What did you discover in the research that you'd wish you had known before getting implants?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_04: In the 90s, breast implants faced lawsuits because they broke apart in women's bodies.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_04: And we observed in the literature that when the silicone leaves the capsule, that's when the chronic illness and actually being able to find measurable disease seems to follow.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_04: When the lawsuit happened, they didn't really need to prove illness to get the devices removed from the market.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_04: They just had to prove that they were not working as intended, meaning breaking.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_04: And so that alone allowed them to be taken off the market.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: And then the women who had like scleroderma and autoimmune diseases and pain syndromes, that kind of just got quiet and it wasn't really talked about.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_04: So in the legal proceedings, they never proved the illness correlation.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but it was documented and there's a lot of papers about it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_04: Around 2006, they came back on the market.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_04: And the primary intention in the reformulation was cohesiveness so that they wouldn't break.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_04: And if you remember the early ads, it was like you can run them over with a car, you can step on them with a high heel.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_04: Remember those ads?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_04: So when women started coming out again with symptoms and health problems and were starting to think, should we look at this again?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: It was a little confusing because there were less people with ruptures than there used to be.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, they used to rupture all the time.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_04: It was like moving down the sides of the ribs and leaving the capsule.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_04: So what we started to learn is that there's a way that silicone can leave the capsule without an obvious rupture, and it's what's called gel bleed.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_04: So basically, your immune system goes up to the implant and starts pulling off tiny pieces of microsilicone and it sees it as a foreign object.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_04: So your immune system's goal is to escort that out of the body.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: And then what happens is it ends up going into your lymphatic system.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_04: And because the lymph cells don't have any enzymatic machinery to break down silicone, a lot of times it'll just get deposited if that white blood cell dies in a lymph node.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_04: And so you end up getting a lot of lymphatic congestion and other issues around having microsilicone throughout the body.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_04: But what I figured out, which was unique to me and potentially a factor in other women who got sick and a differentiating factor in why someone, some women don't get sick, is that our bodies respond to a foreign implant by creating a scar tissue capsule around it.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_04: And that scar tissue capsule has been the study of a lot of research because in the aesthetics world, if it gets too hard or if it contracts, it can look very bad.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_04: So it's considered a bad aesthetic outcome.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_04: But what we found in the implant illness community is that people who get sick usually don't make very good scar tissue, or they make too much in one spot and not enough in another.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_04: So they have uneven capsular formation.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_04: And any access point for the immune system to get into that implant is potentially going to lead to more mobilization of microsilicone.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_04: And remember, the more silicone that leaves the capsule, the more health issues we seem to see in this patient.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: And because these health issues often tend to just be like flipping epigenetic switches and clouding your epigenetic environment, the symptoms can be very variable.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_04: So you could just be lucky when you have an easy to diagnose autoimmune condition that comes on right after you get implants, because we know that mechanism very well.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_04: We know that a foreign body can trigger immune response.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: But when you just have all these symptoms and you don't have an autoimmune disease, people don't understand why.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_04: And so it would be similar to me saying, hey, Sandy, if you smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol every day, your health might decline, right?
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_04: Because you're creating a bad epigenetic environment.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_04: But when it when it's coming from a toxin inside of your body, it's not just happening during the hours you're awake and then you sleep.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_04: It's happening all day and night.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_04: So you can see these epigenetic environments that these women have getting clouded faster and these switches are flipping earlier.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas they might not have turned on a disease process until they were in their 50s, but they might be turning it on now in their mid-30s because they have a higher toxic burden.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_04: Does that make sense?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: It makes sense.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Holy heck, um, I would have never thought about everything that you had just said.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I I know why you're here, right?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's absolutely I don't I don't word fascinating, but it it kind of is, in that you would never think about all of these things and the impact.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: So let's fast forward a little bit and understand.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: So you found out all of this stuff after the fact you're going through this, your life is not the same, right?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: But what changed in your your health after X Plant?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_04: So you know, I went through a lot, like up until X Plant.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_04: I suffered a tremendous amount of things happened.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's like when I look back, I I think I almost blacked out a lot of that period of time.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was so stressful around school and boards and removing the implants and then having to finish and graduate.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_04: And there was a lot of adversity that came up.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's like part of the path, right?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_04: So when I finally explanted and graduated, I really shut down.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I went into like a dark hole.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_04: And when I tried to come out of it, I still really wasn't well.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_04: And I and I didn't know why.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_04: And I had that honeymoon period that some women with severe toxicity experience when they first remove the implant, where they feel temporarily like a relief.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_04: And then they seem to get hit with this like second wave of problems.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_04: And I understand now that that has a lot to do with the way the body then starts to mobilize, stored toxins and microsilicone, and it's now trying to unload the burden that it had been storing.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_04: And there was a lot that I didn't know about my health at that time.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_04: So the journey was just starting, even though I thought I had figured it out, it was just starting.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_04: So I started hosting a television show.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_04: And my goal with the show was to bring health experts on to learn and still try to figure out why I was still having problems.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I still looked very normal, and that was that was hard because people thought I was normal, but I wasn't.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_04: I was, I was very, I still had tons of symptoms and I was really fighting to seem normal, but I wasn't.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I interviewed a doctor and he came on and he was from the complex cardiculinous space and he was a detox expert.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_04: And we talked after the show.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: We went to lunch, and he was like, You have mercury poisoning.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: You have all the symptoms of mercury poisoning.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_04: And when I was exploring X-Plan, I saw a neurologist, and he thought I had MS because of the symptoms I was presenting with that I now know can be caused by mercury as well.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_04: Very similar symptoms to MS, where you have shaking, um extreme hyperreflexia in the limbs, a lot of neuro excitotoxicity because mercury is an excitotoxin.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_04: And we looked for MS, but I didn't have it.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: So we didn't really know why I had these symptoms.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_04: So this doctor was, no, this is mercury poisoning.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_04: So I thought, okay, I had mercury exposures.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: I had mercury fillings in my mouth that broke.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_04: One broke in my mouth the year before I got breast implants.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_04: I learned that when those fillings break all at once, it can mobilize a lot of mercury at once.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_04: And that alone can increase your bucket and your burden, which is what allowed breast implants to be that tipping point event.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_04: So I started learning more about my mercury history.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_04: I started learning about chelation.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_04: And then I started a pretty dark and difficult five-year journey of chelating mercury from my body.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_04: And that was very brutal, but I resolved all of the symptoms.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_04: So I no longer present like I have mercury poisoning, even though probably there's still mercury.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_04: And we all we all have toxins.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_04: But I learned more about the nervous system and why we hold on to things versus not, and have been kind of managing that going forward.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: So well, first and foremost, I'm glad that you're doing better today and that you're sharing your journey.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's hard to hear anyone go through that, but I appreciate how much you're sharing with others.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so, with that, what advice would you give any woman who's considering breast implant surgery?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm a big believer in advocacy and research and being your best advocate, especially in our healthcare system.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: What advice would you give women today who are considering a breast implant surgery?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_04: So, what's interesting is what I one of the main things I've seen working with this population of women is that a lot of women don't get into issues until they do their second set of breast implants.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_04: So I feel like that's the place where the most education is needed because a reasonably healthy person can get breast implants.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_04: They can make really good balanced car tissue capsule and never really have a problem.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: We don't have great guidelines on when to replace.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: So surgeons will tell you 10 years, but there's no data on that number.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_04: It was almost a rumor that then stretch became institutionalized through just telling people, but we don't actually know 10 years, five years, we don't know when they should be replaced.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: Some women never replace them, like they'll keep them in for 40 years.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_04: But when you do replace, you have to think about the conditions of your body and the way you remove them and what you're putting in.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_04: So let's say now you're replacing your implants, you're maybe perimenopausal, postmenopausal, you've had children, your body is in a very different state.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_04: And the typical way is they just cut into the implant capsule, pull out the old implant.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_04: That capsule of scry tissue is sitting in the body and they just it opens now.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_04: So whatever it was walling off well is now open in the body, much like when I described the mercury mobilization event.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_04: Now you have a pretty big hit on your body of whatever was holding in there and that can challenge your body.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_04: Like if I get a small exposure daily to toxins, I can work through them and recover.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_04: When I get a huge hit all at once, it can cause a lot of problems in my body.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_04: So the burden is dependent on the exposure.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_04: So you make this big mobilization event, then you stuff a new implant into that hole.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_04: You leave behind the old scar tissue capsule.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_04: Now it's open.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_04: The Pandora's box is open in the pocket.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_04: And now your body has to make a new scar tissue capsule around the new breast implant.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_04: So that's when things can get a little lost in translation.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_04: And your new scar tissue capsule may not be as good as your old one.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_04: And you've left the old scar tissue capsule behind, which creates an immune system burden.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_04: Because now you have, and this is debated, but you know, a lot of people agree it's an immune system burden, especially from the integrative side.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_04: You just have floating around extra collagen in the chest.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_04: So those are things to consider if you want to replace your implants.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: My typical advice is remove, lift, and like let it be if you want to remove, or leave them alone.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if you're really like healthy, don't like mess with it until there's a good reason to.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_04: And with younger women who really want to augment, and that's something I talk a lot about in the book, is the history of body modification.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's so appealing and cultural and it's tied to like identity and all of these things that I don't have any business telling someone what to do with their body if they want to get them.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: I just want to support them and give them the information.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I always say this the best decisions are made on not what it is you assume, but what it is you know.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: I agree with you.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_03: People have a Right to make a choice, but I always say just be informed in making that choice.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I appreciate your mission in doing that.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now let's talk about your book, Beyond Beauty.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us more what readers can expect in your book.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_04: I wrote it in a story format about my own life and my mother's.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_04: I was adopted illegally as a baby and lived in a very unconventional situation on an island on a boat.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_04: And what I did was I took an index in psychology, which we call the adverse childhood event index.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: It's a quiz that you can take.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_04: Anyone can take it, just Google it.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_04: And what it will do is it will ask you about different adverse childhood events and then give you a score.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_04: And that score has been studied in LinkedIn psychology to outcomes around depression, suicide, addiction, cancer, heart disease.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: And you can see that the higher your score is, the higher your percentage of likelihood to fall into one of those categories as an adult.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's very important to understand the relationship between these adverse childhood events and how we end up with a chronic health condition.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_04: So in my case, I started tracing these early exposures to mercury, which started in utero from my mother, because she had 12 silver fillings while she was pregnant with me.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: And we know mercury passes into the placenta.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: And the child could be born with inherited mercury, potentially from like three generations ago.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_04: When we used to put mercury like in hats, like to prevent sweating, like back around the turn of the century.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_04: So like we can all have heavy metals in our body that come from our ancestors, which is interesting.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: But we start to think about once you have some degree of toxic burden and you have a nervous system that doesn't really relax very well because of trauma, you start to accumulate and store all of the toxins you see from the environment.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_04: So to say that again more plainly, you have to be relaxed to detox.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_04: It's called rest and digest.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_04: So if you're in a sympathetic state because you have PTSD from trauma, or you've developed just a hyper-vigilant compass, which is what we do because trauma creates ADD in the brain, attention deficit, and you start to become hyper-vigilant to counter your own ADD.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_04: Like if I'm just out in breathing air in Los Angeles, or you know, I drink water, I expose myself to like whatever microplastics, I'm going to hold on to them more than maybe a person who's much more calm because they're tapping into rest and digest more.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_04: So over time, we know the way these metals affect methylation and other pathways.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_04: And so I carried on in the story.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_04: I moved through my journey.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_04: I talked a lot around identity, body modification, commodification of a woman's body, how she ends up wanting to objectify herself to survive, to make money.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_04: And then I moved into my time in Los Angeles, why I got breast implants, how I ended up in chiropractic school, the journey around removing the implants, some of the very crazy things that happened along my healing process with Mercury that related to spiritual warfare and how my faith ended up carrying me through those times.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_04: And then ultimately what I call the rebuild phase.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_04: I started learning about the field of regenerative medicine and how we could shift chronic illness into a rebuild phase, like utilizing advanced technologies from Switzerland around cellular signaling and youth signals that come from a placenta.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_04: And that's been largely the focus of my current work.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: You've come from such tough situations and just turned it into such a journey of healing and helping others and sharing your expertise.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: And none of it has come easy, but I love your resiliency and your desire to share, especially through your book, Beyond Beauty.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you for giving us an idea of what is in that book, and we'll be sure to link to it.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: What are some final thoughts if you had to leave people with that can really help them be an advocate for themselves and be aware?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: What are some final thoughts that you would leave people with?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_04: I think that connecting with other people who've walked a path before you, especially in more nation complex areas, like for me, that was instrumental.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_04: If I hadn't connected with a group of women in like a Facebook group who had been through breast implant illness, I never would have been part of the movement or ultimately been able to even have a platform to help women through my story.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_04: So I think the community part of support, but I will say that there's a time when you have to draw a line because I also saw myself falling into the trap of getting overly invested in these chronic illness forums, especially later when I had already been sick for a long time and I had made being sick part of my identity.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_04: And part of how I shifted out of that identity was by removing myself from those forums.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_04: So it's funny how they were instrumental in enlightening me in the beginning, but eventually I had to make a clean break because what ends up happening is I would wake up every day and I would be connecting with other sick people who we were all in the same boat.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_04: So like there wasn't much way for us to shift our identity away from it.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_04: And that's also ultimately what I had to do to become healthy and get out of chronic illness.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: There's a big mindset component.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_04: And we have to think about why we attach to an identity, like what is it that a negative identity, like what is serving us about it, and really do like that inner work to figure out what is the payout I'm getting by staying sick.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_04: And so once I started examining those things, I decided to make a clean break from basically even acknowledging my illness.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: And once I shifted my mindset, I didn't heal immediately, but things, that alignment and that connection with the creator and with like my divine health and my divine birthright to have vitality and be a child of God on earth in my purpose, allowed the things that really healed me to just come into my life through channels I didn't expect.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_04: And they were so impactful and I was ready for them.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_04: And then they allowed me to heal.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: I love your statement.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: The identities that help us survive are not always the identities that help us heal.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: So because I think we can get tied to an identity, especially if you come from a troubled background.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: That's the identity that you know, but that's not the identity that helps you heal.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: And then you tell in your story, you've really evolved in your journey and have taken on a different identity that's really helped you heal and live the better life that you're living today.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's accurate.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_04: I think that one of the fundamental problems with having an identity is that it's boxing you in.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_04: And as we move through time, each new moment is a chance to renew and be in that moment, right?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_04: So if I'm attached to an identity that I built in survival, that's like being stuck in the past, right?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and if I over-identify with a future identity, then that's being in the future.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_04: So the goal, like in order to heal, you have to be in present time.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: So the more we're outsourcing parts of ourselves and financing insecurities or old patterns, that's less physical energy you have in the moment to heal.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_04: So our goal at all times is to be in alignment with who we are today now, and then not have an expectation of where life or God or the day is gonna take us, but to be open and show up as our best version of ourselves and then to integrate with the new things that come in and to be ever renewed.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_04: That's kind of like the foundation of being alive, right?
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_04: And this is something people are seeing with AI, like the more they're learning and changing, like we're rapidly growing and changing and shifting our identities.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_04: So, like, I don't want to be boxed in to an identity, but I do want to point out that when you're in chronic illness and when you're in a crisis or you're in any situation, the early childhood identity formation is really what keeps your brain from going off the deep end.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_04: So having core values that are cornerstones that you can anchor into into your identity that don't shift are very important.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_04: So it's sort of like dropping these, these archetypal identities and enhancing core values that give you the integrity of who you are, and then anchoring to those in the moment or when you're in adversity.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_04: Like that's sort of the winning combination.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciate what you're saying.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: Gosh, there's so much to uncover.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I wish we had more time to get into that.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: But that's why you have your book, Beyond Beauty.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_03: As I said, we'll make sure and link to that because there's so much to uncover.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: And again, I appreciate your journey.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_03: I know it wasn't an easy one, but I appreciate how you've evolved and to the identity that you have today and continue to grow because I think we all continue to grow and be that light to others to help them navigate and to be a better advocate and by sharing your story and certainly by all the details you have in your book.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_03: So, Dr.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Kate, I really appreciate you and thank you for sharing with us today.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: I really appreciate it.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_03: I enjoy having Dr.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: Kate on the show.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: Such an open and enlightening conversation.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: Check out her website and link to details about her book, Beyond Beauty, in the show notes.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: In our next episode, what happens when a terminal diagnosis, devastating betrayal, and the loss of everything you knew arrive almost all at once?
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_03: Do you let it break you or do you turn your darkest chapter into a mission that gives others hope?
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: To discuss this further, I am bringing Emma Victoria Johnson on the show.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: Emma is a stage four breast cancer survivor who was given a terminal prognosis and told she had months to live.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: It could have broken her, but instead it gave her purpose.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Emma's mission is to give people hope, help them find treatment options, and make sure no one feels alone during the darkest time of their lives.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: Don't miss this episode and to make sure you don't follow so you get that notification and you can tune in to this episode.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_03: Until next time, get savvy.